Three Easy Ways to make #GivingTuesday A Success in Baltimore

On Tuesday, December 3rd Blue Water Baltimore will be asking our supporters to do something pretty special: help prove Baltimore is the most generous city in America! We know how special the people in Baltimore are: every day we work with you to protect our watersheds: 124 thousand acres of them. Every year we are…

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Meet David Flores, New Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper

From Halle Van der Gaag, Executive Director of Blue Water Baltimore: I am pleased to announce that David Flores has been selected as the new Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper. David has been working with the Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper program since 2009, at first through his position at the Jones Falls Watershed Association and since 2011 as…

Blue Water Baltimore Intervention in EPA Agreement Ruled “Untimely”

Blue Water Baltimore Executive Director Halle Van der Gaag today released the following statement in response to a U.S. District Court recent ruling denying the organization’s citizen intervention in a 2002 consent decree between Baltimore City, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) requiring the City to fix the sewer…

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64,000 Rain Gardens for the Chesapeake Bay?

Do rain gardens really work to protect aquatic wildlife? Researchers at Washington State University decided to find out for sure, and set up a pretty simple but clever test: salmon.  They collected storm water from around the Seattle region and filtered some of it through soil similar to that in a typical rain garden.  They…

YouthWorks 2013 A Big Success

Since 2003 Blue Water Baltimore has enjoyed hosting a team from Baltimore City’s YouthWorks program. In 2013 we trained and employed eight high school students for six weeks, teaching them the skills to maintain Baltimore’s urban forest. The trainees worked with our staff and volunteers to survey 33 sites.  After identifying maintenance priorities, them teams…

Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper leaving Blue Water Baltimore to test other waters

After a wonderful year and a half as the Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper at Blue Water Baltimore, and five years in the Baltimore area, I have decided to move to California in September to “test other waters.” This is a bittersweet farewell for me, as I have grown extremely fond of the Baltimore area, the amazing…

Blue Water Baltimore Seeks Citizen Intervention to Address Sewage Pollution

Today Blue Water Baltimore is taking a critical step forward to address the millions of gallons of untreated sewage that flow into Baltimore’s waterways annually by asking the Federal District Court in Baltimore to allow us to intervene in a lawsuit against the City of Baltimore. This lawsuit was settled by a consent decree in…

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Halle Van der Gaag Receives SmartCEO Brava! Award

[Note: guest post from T.J. Mullen, chairman of the board of directors at Blue Water Baltimore] Lately there’s been a lot of buzz about women business leaders, and how we need more of them. At Blue Water Baltimore, we’re fortunate to have one such leader at our helm. On July 10th I was very pleased…

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Why A Fracking Ban Matters to Baltimore

If you live in Baltimore, hydraulic fracturing (aka “fracking”) in Maryland might seem like someone else’s problem. After all, it’s not very likely that we’ll see fracking in Patterson Park. Yet, Blue Water Baltimore is taking a strong stance that we need a ban on fracking in Maryland. And we think you should too. Why?…